Of Fools and Disappointment

First, let me get the disappointment out the way. We can't get hold of a Surface machine. Damn shame! Still, the multitouch meeting I had on Friday went really well and we are all defiantly looking forward to working together on it. As it allows us to put together plenty of material through the final year student (Tim) ready for looking at doing a proper research project on it next year. So I should still get to play with some homebrew multitouch stuff this year!

On to fools. There are many of them. Some were gathered in the meeting I have just come back from. Andy and I were demoing the Virtual Sports Centre we have been building to the sports lecturers. By 'we' I mean 'me' (Sorry Andy :p). There are a couple of them that think it's a great idea and hopefully they grasp what it is we are trying to do. Which is give them another tool to teach with that promotes independent learning in not only a visual way but contextual (in a virtual world sense) as well as begin to link the different subjects under Sport together. More so than what happens now.

However. The previously mentioned fools... oh dear God. Narrow minded are not the words. They couldn't grasp that we want to provide a tool that allows students to see more than just their field of learning. To allow them to see across different subjects, to relate and see how what they are learning applies across many different things. We got asked questions like "Well what can we do in this that we can't in blackboard?"... how about everything we've just shown you. They think that just because that they can upload their own files to blackboard and link it to what the students can see it compares to the dynamic system we demoed today. Er... no I don't think so. They also seemed to think that we are developing this tool because we don't think they communicate or use blackboard as their sole teaching tool. No. We are developing it to aid in the teaching of students. We are developing it because at some point Virtual Learning Environments like blackboard are going to evolve in to a visual area more than the point and click text and folder based... thing that it is. We are going one step (or more) than the game is at the moment. Unfortunately some of them seem to be under the impression that blackboard will get features like this and that this will happen soon. A system where you have to pay over a grand just to have a collapsible directory tree put in and has only just allowed for things like Blogs and Podcasts will not be getting functionality like that any time soon.